Selkie417

Happy 2014 Selkie readers! (Actually I am posting this a few hours early, so it may be 2013 still as you read this. Early strip to celebrate. XD) It’s been another great year, and I am looking forward to many more to share with you. 😀

Sarnothi religion includes the concept of a dual-spirit. There is a spirit-self which is comparable to the idea of a "soul", but also a second spirit (a separate entity entirely) that serves as a bridge between the corporeal and spiritual worlds. Pluralized word forms are commonly used to address both a person's spirit-self and their spirit-bridge counterpart simultaneously, to avoid disrespecting one or the other.

I thought it was trying to end words with consonents that required putting the tongue on teeth. Since she has pointy teeth it seems like it’d be more difficult for her than a human. Thinking of the “All I want for Chistmas is My Two Front Teeth” song.

Rabbit brothers Foot, Foot-Foot and Foot-Foot-Foot are sitting around in their rabbit hole. Foot says to Foot-Foot and Foot-Foot-Foot, “Let’s go sneak some carrots from Farmer Ben’s Farm.” Foot, Foot-Foot, and Foot-Foot-Foot go sneak carrots, and Farmer Ben catches them. He takes a swipe with his scythe and while Foot-Foot and Foot-Foot-Foot get away, he cuts Foot clean in two.

Next day Foot-Foot says to Foot-Foot-Foot, “Hey, let’s go sneak some carrots from Farmer Ben’s farm.” Foot-Foot-Foot says to Foot-Foot, “Are you kidding? We already got one foot in the grave!”

One gets unexpected plurals in English, of course. Like the Royal “We” referring to Monarch and State. Or the medical “We” referring to the MD and the patient the MD’s patronising. And the fact that we have no plural form of the second person must have confused things.

Thou=Tu.
You=Vous.
Thou was the singular familiar form.
You was the plural form, or the singular formal form. (Or both, of course.)
But now, ‘you’ works as all three. Who knows why.
Although I’m not sure where ‘ye’ comes in. (as in ‘hear ye! Hear ye!’)

English used to contain a letter, by way of the Saxons, that looked like this: Y, and pronounced like a hard “th”.

So in Ye Olde Englishe, Ye=The, and “Ye Olde Shoppe” is in fact THE Old Shop.

The “ye” in “hear ye” is an old spelling of “thee”, which is the formal/plural of the informal singular “thou”. Now you’re ready to understand not only “hear ye”, but that bit in Twelfth Night where it is suggested that Sir Andrew annoy Cesario: “If thou thou’st him some thrice, it shall not be amiss;”. Thee would be polite – thou is over-familiar to address a superior.

I understand the general history of Thou being familiar and You being formal, and the shift to You taking up the entire role except for Thou used to address Deity.

I don’t think You is formal anymore – we haven’t had that distinction for a long time. And I doubt Y’all has *ever* been formal. (It’s still fun and useful, and although it’s not part of my dialect I do make use of it, particularly in writing online.)

I feel the same way. But I’m a bit disappointed that it’s a grammatical issue instead of a physical issue. It made more sense to me as a physical issue (related to my difficulty learning how to pronounce the British English lax-O sound (the cot/caught distinction) and the KH/GH/X sounds (loch/Bach has one of them)).

Also, I wonder how the dual-spirit concept differs from the trichotomous-being concept of Christianity: a soul that resides in and controls a body, plus a spirit to communicate with God – the spirit originally dead due to sin, but brought to life at the point of salvation. The dual-spirit sounds a bit more like an astral thing to me but I look forward to learning more about it.

Do the Sarnothi believe that humans share this trait, or that they lack a spiritual component?

This backstory of Pohl’s adjustment is fascinating. Would love to find out about his missing hand webbing. Wondering if it was from an accident, birth defect, something he deliberately did to fit in better at the hospital or if something scary happened before they escaped to the land.

…he’s missing hand webbing? I did not notice this. If he did remove it – ever read Trumpet of the Swan? The trumpet playing swan has the webbing of one foot sliced so he can play better, leaving him a bit prone to swim in circles if he isn’t careful.

and to think all this time I assumed it was classic cartoon reptile slurring from having a mouth full of poisonous spit, or possibly just the opposite of how spanish speakers can’t bring themselves to start a word with S because it doesn’t happen in their language.. i reckoned maybe the whole sarnothi language was riddled with Ss

I believe the phenomenon you’re referring to is about starting a word with S *and* another consonant: st, sp, sk, sn, sm, and whichever ones I’m forgetting.

Thus Estupido, instead of Stupido. I’ve seen this sort of pattern repeatedly, but I haven’t studied enough Spanish to really have a handle on it yet.

It might be more to the point how certain languages dislike ending a word on certain consonants (particularly plosives), so these words end up with a vowel. Esperanto makes it a requirement for the major word classes (except in poetry).